A Panorama of the Skies
Using RoomAlive Toolkit to transform the experience of a normal conference a room into an ever-changing skyspace.
A Panorama of the Skies is a prototype of an immersive audiovisual installation created in collaboration between Maja Petrić, an artist, and Hrvoje Benko, a human-computer interaction researcher at Microsoft Research. Together they have been researching possibilities of immersive technologies through which a space can be experienced emotionally.
Exhibited: December 2015 – March 2016
The sound was created by Daniel Peterson, a doctoral student at the University of Washington’s Center for Digital Art and Experimental Media with an emphasis on composition and 3D spatial sound using ambisonics. Using recordings of natural sounds, he has created an immersive soundscape that modulates between the real and the imaginary by the use of experimental 3D audio techniques to create diffuse soundfields.
Normal conference room at Microsoft is transformed…
… into a place at dawn …
…where the sun rises …
…until the lighting strikes…
… and the storm takes over…
… until the calm after the storm…
…in the purpose of complete immersion of a viewer into an elevated emotional space.
Maja’s and Hrvoje’s focus has been on the innovative application of audiovisual experience that engages perception, emotion, and imagination, and morphs experience of space. For this project, they transformed the experience of an otherwise normal conference a room in Microsoft’s Building 99, through the use of audiovisual content, with a multi-projector, multi-depth-camera framework called RoomAlive Toolkit. The system uses 5 projectors and 8 Kinect cameras to acquire a detailed map of the room, register the projectors and cameras into a single coordinate system, and enable real-time projection mapping in the immersive scene.
About the artist
Maja Petrić is an artist working at the interface of science, technology, and art. Her work is about transforming poetic experience of space through light. During her art residency at Microsoft Research, she has been exploring the essence of the sky both thematically and experientially in collaboration with natural interaction researcher Hrvoje Benko and machine learning researcher Nebojša Jojić.
Maja holds the Doctorate in Digital Art and Experimental Media (DXARTS) from University of Washington and the Masters degree in new media art from New York University, Tisch School of the Arts, Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). Maja grew up in Croatia during the violent fragmentation of Yugoslavia. It is then that she became preoccupied with using art to transform the sense of her surroundings. Her work is about transforming the poetic experience of space through light.
Some of the venues where she exhibited include Henry Art Gallery, Matadero Madrid, Medialab Prado, and Amazon Gallery. Some of the awards she received include Richard Kelly Light Art Award, two Thunen Lighting Awards, and Doctoral Fellowship from Croatian Science Foundation. Most recently, The Centre for International Light Art nominated her for International Light Art Award.
People
Research Science Manager
Oculus Research
Sound Artist
University of Washington